


Strike 3, You're Out

by reet_reet



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: 3 Deaths Rule, Angst, Dream Team SMP Spoilers, Gen, How Do I Tag, a couple tws will be posted in the notes, but she took too long so im posting it without her hahaha, catch me posting after like 2 years of being inactive, i would say no beta reader we die like men but i actually DID get a beta reader, i wrote 85 percent of this in chemistry class, no editing we die like men, tommyinnit whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:01:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27852142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reet_reet/pseuds/reet_reet
Summary: Wilbur had been in this room too many times. This time, it would be his last.An alternate ending to the L’Manburg Finale, using the "three canonical deaths” in the Dream SMP concept.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & TommyInnit, Clay | Dream & Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF), Clay | Dream & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Dave | Technoblade & Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit, Eret & TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Grayson | Purpled & Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Niki | Nihachu & Toby Smith | Tubbo, Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot, Toby Smith | Tubbo & TommyInnit, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 22
Kudos: 107





	Strike 3, You're Out

**Author's Note:**

> a couple trigger warnings before we begin: gore, self-harm, death. The self-harm only happens right at the end, so keep that in mind!
> 
> howdy yall! i havent posted on ao3 in literal years, but here i am, freshly inspired. ill probably look back at this tomorrow and regret posting it, but eh!
> 
> the one shots only about 3K words, so its not a long read!
> 
> hope you enjoy my barely edited, mostly just from a daydream one-shot!

Wilbur had been in this room too many times.

But the funny thing was, every time Wilbur had come here before, he was so close to snapping, so close to boiling over. He was angry, hurt, manic, overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with emotion that throbbed in his brain and caused him to itch for destruction. 

This time though, this time Wilbur wasn’t angry. He wasn’t overwhelmed. He was at peace. He sat in the room, his eyes closed for a moment. Fireworks popped and shook the room, causing dust particles to float down, filling his lungs with musty air. 

Some hidden part of his brain wanted him to sit and wait for a bit longer. Maybe Tommy would show up again. Maybe Tommy would stop him. Maybe Phil would come back, just in the nick of time, and convince him to return to the surface. Wilbur dismissed that part of his head as the insanity that everyone keeps screaming about. 

Nimble hands traced the button, wood splinters tugged at his fingertips. Tension released from his shoulders, and Wilbur softly smiled. 

He smiled as he finally pushed the button.

  
  


\---

Tommy’s ears rang as he dodged a firework from Technoblade at the last second. The battlefield was bright, and everything hurt. Tommy couldn’t tell who was on what side anymore, he was just focused on staying alive. 

The reflection of the fireworks against everyone’s glowing purple armor coupled with the shouts of allies and enemies alike overpowered by the threatening boom of explosive projectiles going off caused Tommy’s head to throb. 

Everyone was wearing netherite.

But Wilbur wasn’t.

Panic bloomed in Tommy’s chest as he scanned the crowd, looking for his brother. His eyes blurred as light constantly reflected off of everyone’s protective shielding. There wasn’t a single person in a trench coat. With a heart in his throat, Tommy stopped scanning the people up and fighting, and started looking for bodies on the ground. Still no sign of Wilbur. 

“Tommy!” 

Tommy jumped and turned around, sword raised, to see Tubbo standing behind him.

“Have you seen Wilbur?” Tommy shouted, barely able to hear his own voice over the cries of the battlefield. 

“No,” Tubbo replied. “I can’t find him anywhere!”

Tommy bit down on the inside of his cheek as he thought back to the last time he had seen his brother. It was right before the battle had begun on the outskirts of L’Manburg. He had walked off. The only places he could go in such a short time was one of the buildings right outside the borders of their nation, or…

The taste of blood stung Tommy’s tongue as he bit down a bit too hard once he realized where Wilbur was. He was back in the room. But the fight had erupted just outside L’Manburg, meaning that if Tommy were to get to Wilbur in time to stop him, he had to go. _Now._

He looked back at Tubbo, searching for something to say. Tommy couldn’t think of anything in time, but he knew by the look in his friend’s eye that Wilbur’s whereabouts had just dawned on Tubbo as well. So he didn’t waste any more time and dashed back into L’Manburg territory, shedding armor in hopes of picking up speed.

Tommy hardly got anywhere close to the room by the podium before L’Manburg began to shake underneath him.

His cry was lost, drowned out by the sound of the ground below his feet exploding.

\---

Dream awoke with a sharp gasp. 

A blink cleared his head and refocused his eyes. His leg was trapped under a piece of rubble. With a quick, hard yank, Dream freed his ankle and stumbled to his feet. 

Dream wanted to say that L’Manburg was in shambles before him, but the truth be told, there was no L’Manburg left to even be in shambles. Wilbur had successfully gone through with the plan, and finally ended the country that’s been a pain in Dream’s ass for far too long.

Some people would call Dream a monster for planning this. His only response would be a blank stare underneath a smiling mask, because inside he knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, it was safe to say that morally, Dream was far more in the right compared to Wilbur. After all, it was Dream’s idea to lead the fight outside of the center of the blast zone to avoid casualties. 

He may hate (and be hated by) all of the citizens of L’Manburg, but he doesn't want them dead. Well, permanently dead, that is. After all, they were all friends, once upon a time.

Dream shifted his weight onto his good leg and looked over the battlefield. Most people seemed to be sitting up, freeing themselves from stray bits of rubble, or at least stirring on the ground. There seemed to be no major injuries, at least on his side. Good.

A sudden burst of movement caught Dream’s eye, and he turned to observe the commotion. Tubbo, the new president of this great crater, had gotten up and decided to run directly towards the edge of the hole that used to be L’Manburg. He wasted no time climbing down the steep slope, rushing through the crumbling land filled with water and uneven ground. He was screaming something, but Dream couldn’t quite make out what it was.

Sapnap appeared at Dream's side and shot him a questioning look. Dream only replied with a shrug. But as Tubbo’s cries became more frantic, Dream finally let his curiosity get the best of him. He, along with Sapnap, started to make their way down the pit, following the general trail that the boy had taken. 

Dream assumed that Tubbo was running to find Wilbur. He prepared to fight to keep the traitor safe from the angry and mortified group that was beginning to clamber down the crater behind the two men. Dream was beginning to curse his ankle, which was appearing to be sprained. Sapnap wasn’t unscathed either, he had various burns and cuts peppering the places where his battle-worn chest plate had begun to fail him. So Dream attempted to pick up his pace, hoping to put some distance between him and the mob.

Tubbo’s screams were suddenly silenced, and Dream furrowed his brows. They were nowhere near the button room. Tubbo shouldn’t have found Wilbur yet. So where was he going?

Dream’s questions were answered when he and Sapnap stumbled across him, huddled over something on the ground.

Deciding to take the lead, Dream approached the boy. He glanced down and…

Oh.

Clearly, Dream had miscounted when he believed that everyone was somewhat safely outside L’Manburg by the time it blew up. 

“Sapnap,” he murmured, gesturing for his friend to stand by him. 

Sapnap visibly blinked in shock as he saw what, or rather _who_ , Tubbo had been looking for. 

Tommy was lying awkwardly on the ground, covered in burns that puckered the boy’s flesh and made Dream unconsciously wrinkle his nose. Tubbo had clearly recovered Tommy from being buried under bits of rubble- the nasty bruises and splinters appearing from where his shirt was just slightly ridden up made that very clear. But worst of all was the metal pole sticking brutally out of his shoulder. It was twisted and blunt, covered in blood.

Miraculously, Tommy was still awake, heaving through his pain. In fact, he seemed more aware of his surroundings than Tubbo did. The boy in question was sobbing excessively, and his hands were shaking. Tommy seemed to be trying to calm him down, but it was obvious that he couldn’t move much due to the pain. 

“Don’t-” Tubbo hiccuped. “Don’t die. Please don’t. Please, don’t die.”

Tommy tried to open his mouth to say something, but his obviously lethal wounds made him sluggish. 

“Tubbo,” Sapnap intervened, not unkindly. "Breathe, man. Tommy will be fine. He’ll just come back to life.”

Tubbo didn’t like Sapnap’s lackluster attempt at comfort, and he buried his head into Tommy’s shoulder. A group made up of Eret, Purpled, Quackity, and Niki began to approach. 

Dream noticed how Tommy’s lip trembled, and he looked away from the three people surrounding him. Alarm bells rang softly in his head. Like him or not, Dream had practically watched this kid grow up. He knew his tells when it came to heavy information Tommy didn’t want to share.

Dream crouched beside Tubbo. “How many lives do you have left, Tommy?” He asked quietly. 

“He should be all good, right? The only time I've seen Tommy die was during the dual,” Sapnap said. Eret nodded in agreement. 

“Dream.” Tommy’s voice was softer and more scared than Dream had ever heard. “I don’t want to die.” He attempted to stifle a sob, but it only turned into a cry of pain. 

Dream’s heart lept into his throat as he was caught off guard by Tommy’s show of emotion. His head was racing, thinking of reasons why the injured kid would open up in front of him, but he could only think of one logical option. 

Tommy was on his last life. And if he didn’t get help soon, this death would be his last.

Springing into action, Dream’s mind was wiped of all past wars and differences. He pushed Tubbo off of Tommy as gently as possible and immediately began to put pressure on the wound in Tommy's shoulder. The angle was awkward, and Dream’s hands didn’t do much to stop the bleeding.

“Does _anyone_ have a healing potion?” He shouted frantically, looking back at the group when he got no immediate response. Everybody there, particularly Quackity and Sapnap, were openly gawking at him. Tubbo was curled in a ball by himself, covered in blood that wasn’t his. 

“Dream, what're you-” Purpled began.

“For fuck’s sake!” Dream roared. “This is _it_ for him!”

At that, everyone seemed to snap into motion at once. Their shock at Dream attempting to nurse Tommy was forgotten. The people of the SMP had never truly lost anyone before, and they weren’t about to now. Purpled began rummaging through his inventory to find any stray potions, Niki immediately sunk to the ground beside Tubbo and turned his head away from the gore, Quackity started screaming for help, and Eret lunged forward to help Dream. 

“Here," Eret said, his voice as unnervingly smooth as ever as he handed Dream his kingly coat. Dream wrapped the wound containing the pole in Tommy's shoulder with the coat and began applying pressure once more.

Through gritted teeth, Tommy let out an ear-piercing screech of pain. Eret attempted to calm him, muttering soothing words under his breath and stroking the boy’s hair. It didn’t do much to help him, because Tommy’s shriek had led him into a violent fit of coughing. The bar that Dream was trying to tend to begun shaking, jostling with along with Tommy. 

“Hold him still, Eret!” Dream hissed, cutting himself off as once he looked over he saw that Tommy was coughing up blood. Clearly, the rubble that had previously fallen on him had done more damage to his internal organs than Dream had expected. 

Tommy hiccupped and began to stretch his good hand out. Dream went to intervene, but a look from Eret had him abort the motion. Tommy was reaching for Tubbo. 

Tubbo grabbed onto Tommy’s slightly charred hand. At that moment, the reality of the situation had truly sunken into Dream- and Tommy as well. Tommy’s wounds were too brutal. Nobody had a healing potion. For the first time in a very, very long time, Dream felt his eyes well up in tears.

But Dream knew that he was not the person that Tommy wanted to see on his- well, his deathbed. So Dream slowly stood up, hardly able to feel the pain in his ankle, and hobbled backward. Quackity’s yells for help trailed off, and Niki gasped audibly.

“He’s not…” Sapnap muttered to Dream, trailing off as he glanced at the part of Dream’s face that wasn’t blocked by the mask. 

“There’s nothing I can do,” Dream said quietly. Sapnap cursed under his breath, his hands held uselessly at his side. 

“It’s going to be okay,” Tommy wheezed. “You’ll be okay Tubbo.” 

“I- I don’t want to- I’ll miss you!” Tubbo stuttered, squeezing onto Tommy’s hand as if his life depended on it. 

Dream noticed Techno slowly approaching the group, his crossbow at the ready. Dream stepped forward, this time preparing himself to fight not to protect Wilbur, but to protect the last moments that Tommy had with the few people he cared about. 

“Don’t worry ‘bout it.” Tommy smiled up at Tubbo, his teeth stained with blood. “Just… just put on a disk for me, yeah?”

“Okay,” Tubbo whispered.

With that, Tommy nodded and sighed- much too satisfied and tired to ever be heard from a 16-year-old boy. 

He didn’t take another breath.

When he heard Tubbo’s ungodly scream, Techno paused in his footsteps. His crossbow lowered, and he began his approach again. This time, not to harm, but rather to investigate. Dream turned away. He didn’t want to see the expression on Techno’s face when he realized that his little brother had died his last death. 

The motion was pointless though, because as Dream turned around, he noticed movement in the distance. The other brother.

Wilbur.

\---

“The roads are my home, horizon’s my target,” Wilbur sang softly. “If I keep on moving, never lose sight of it.” 

He paused his breathy tune to sidestep a bit of a crumbling building. Wilbur practically floated over the ground, his feet carried him lightly as he explored the damage he had done. His head was fuzzy and his heart felt warm. Wilbur couldn’t tell if that was from shock, or if he had really just lost all sense of his own humanity. 

“Treating my memory of you like a fire, let it burn out,” This time, his singing was interrupted by screams that were slowly growing louder. It sounded like Quackity. Wilbur’s mood was slightly dampened. After all that, they were still fighting.

Despite all common sense telling him to stay away from the people who’s home he just blew up, Wilbur decided to meander his way across the crater and follow the sounds ricocheting off the cliffs of the crater. Curiosity killed the cat, as they all say. 

It wasn’t that hard to find a large group of people, mostly based on that odd shriek that echoed loudly and left only silence in its wake. Dream was there, mask blank and taunting as always. He had limped his way in front of the rest of the people in that group. People, Wilbur noted, that were very much citizens of the new L’Manburg that blew up.

Wilbur couldn’t help but giggle. After all that, Dream must've thought that he wouldn’t really go through with it. Dream, L’Manburg’s number one enemy, hadn’t really wanted it gone. He betrayed Wilbur.

“Quite a party we have here!” Wilbur called, stepping over a fallen wooden pillar. “What’re we looking at?”

Frankly, Wilbur was offended that he didn’t get an immediate response. Everyone was grouped around something, blocking it from his view. He raised an eyebrow at Technoblade, who was standing on the opposite side of the huddle to him, but his brother didn’t even bother looking up at him. He stared downwards in a muted way, looking incredibly tired. 

“This is being turned into a much bigger deal than it needs to be," Wilbur said. "L’Manburg was a disease! It's better gone."

“You’re a monster, Wil,” Niki said as she stood up. Her voice quivered, but her eyes portrayed a fire that Wilbur had never seen before in his best friend. 

Wilbur threw his hands into the air. “You’re all acting like I did something so irreversible. We all know that you can just rebuild whatever I took down," he said.

The group was sat in stunned silence, and Wilbur took that as his queue to move forwards. He was met with Sapnap’s sword to his throat. Wilbur chuckled again and risked glancing down to see what everyone was was looking at. He expected to see the bright colours of a L’Manburg flag left in a burnt pile.

Instead, he was met with a lot more red than expected. Red sleeves, red blistered skin, red blood staining the normally white shirt. Red was everywhere, and it was beginning to hurt Wilbur’s eyes. It was beginning to hurt his head. 

His brain was _screaming_ at him because that’s a body, but he was sure that nobody was on their last life, but that’s a body, there’s so much red, and that’s _Tommy_.

Tommy, who was a headache to deal with. He started problems and refused to solve them. He was headstrong, clingy, and was the reason for many of the times Wilbur found himself in deep shit. Tommy, who he never seemed to be able to get rid of. When even Wilbur had snapped, threatened the boy, insulted him, and driven him away from all his friends, he still stuck by his side. Tommy, who could always make Wilbur laugh, even in the most dire situations. Tommy, who was just a kid. Tommy, who was his little brother.

Wilbur was left without a silver-tongued remark. Tubbo was talking instead, talking about how when they had first met as little kids, Tommy had used his first death to save Tubbo. Something about how Tommy had begged him not to tell anyone. 

And wasn’t that just _hilarious_?

Tommy had just died. Permanently. Wilbur had just murdered his baby brother.

Laughter bubbled to his lips, and Wilbur’s brain was _screaming_ at him. He turned away from the body and clapped a hand to his mouth. It didn’t do much to stifle the laughter, so his hand drifted to the side of his face.

He was _laughing_ and his brain was _screaming_.

Wilbur dug his fingernails into his cheekbones, hard enough to draw blood. The pain was enough to ground him for a second. So he dug deeper, sinking to his knees as his laughter turned to an ugly mix of cackles and sobs. Salty tears stung the crescent-shaped wounds where Wilbur’s fingernails were ripping through his flesh. 

He heard the tell-tale click of a crossbow being loaded and aimed behind him. Wilbur didn’t bother to turn around to stop his only brother remaining from taking the shot. Nobody protested. They all knew Wilbur was on his third life too.

Wilbur was dead before his body hit the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> well, that was something, wasnt it? 
> 
> i wanted to say thanks to dargon for not really beta reading, but for saying she would once i finished. its the thought that counts! i finished writing and just got impatient and posted... thanks to noki for being an absolute icon and inspiring me to write! and a final thanks to the dollar store dream smp server, yall are absolute pogchamp people!
> 
> so yeah! i basically just wrote this cuz i was watching some angsty tik toks the night before, and they were all like m m m m m m t o m m y b l o w i n g u p w i t h l m a n b u r g. i had this idea stuck in my head all day until i wrote it out!


End file.
